Munson: Internet upgrades keep rural Iowans in loop

Dec. 4, 2010

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Ann Borseth uses a wireless connection through her DSL hookup to get Internet access in her business, Country Chiropractic, in rural Truro. / RODNEY WHITE/THE REGISTER

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Truro, Ia. - Ann Borseth cracks as many as 50 patients' backs per week in a converted chicken coop that serves as her Country Chiropractic office on her acreage northeast of Truro.

High-speed online access has become almost a necessity in her daily life, even in this pastoral rural setting along a gravel road.

She logs on to file health insurance claims. Admits she's a Facebook addict. Streams pop music radio into her doctor's office through her laptop. Coordinates her and her fiance's combined household of five boys, ages 6 to 15, on her Outlook calendar, which is synchronized with her BlackBerry.

"I hope to have a Web page here pretty soon," she added Thursday, as she scurried around, cleaning the office.

Borseth's office computer is connected to the Internet via a wireless router that transmits the signal from the main landline hookup in her house.

If "wireless router" is about as far as you want to go with the computer terminology, don't worry. I encounter lots of Iowans in various stages of online transition - or lack thereof - as I travel the state.

Tens of millions of dollars in federal loan money have been flowing into rural Iowa to upgrade Internet service, touted as essential to help make small towns more attractive places to live and work.

But it's not as if everybody has hopped onto this virtual bandwagon.

Truro's 400 or so residents plus the surrounding rural areas in Warren and Madison counties offer a timely microcosm.

We can shift our focus no farther than to the next driveway east along 300th Street - to Borseth's future in-laws, Jerry and Charlotte Clarke. So far, the Clarkes have been content to remain offline and let the digital revolution pass them by.

"The only thing I would really want is parts," Jerry said when I interrupted him in the middle of affixing trim to the perimeter of his new kitchen floor.

Jerry also is in the middle of repairing three lawn mowers in his shop. When he phones for replacement parts, he's inevitably told that he should easily search for and order the precise parts online.

Jerry is a retired union carpenter who still farms 160 acres and for years has organized his finances on a home computer. But he's not much interested in learning the ways of the Web.

"The knowledge doesn't automatically come to you," he said.

The Clarkes aren't alone in shunning high-speed connection. The nonprofit Connect Iowa in conjunction with the Iowa Utilities Board released a report earlier this year that showed 34 percent of Iowa households remain without a high-speed or broadband Internet connection - the vast majority by choice, whether due to lack of interest or concerns over cost.

More than 95 percent of Iowans have access to at least basic land-based broadband Internet. But a lot of work is under way to make the network ever faster for the future.

Federal government bankrolls upgrades

The digital revolution literally was passing the Clarkes by last week, as a crew from Minnesota stretched new fiber optic cable from giant red spools and buried it along 300th Street. Interstate Communications is the local family telecommunications company based in Truro that serves about 1,100 customers, also in and around nearby St. Charles and St. Marys. The company has replaced about 90 percent of its old copper lines with fiber optics to provide faster Internet service and more cable TV options in an effort to remain competitive.

Interstate Communications is among the 147 members of the Iowa Telecommunications Association that compete with satellite TV and Internet providers such as DirecTV, which lures customers with exclusive NFL programming, or WildBlue, which currently tallies 7,794 subscribers across Iowa.

Fiber optic cable installation costs as much as $15,000 per mile, said Pat McGowan, Interstate Communications' vice president of operations. So the company has drawn from a $7 million, 20-year loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fund the project - its portion of a $690 million national investment by the USDA's Telecommunications Infrastructure Loan Program during fiscal year 2010.

The Federal Communications Commission unfurled its own National Broadband Plan earlier this year. Debate has ensued within the industry on how best to spread higher-speed Internet access to all rural areas and fund network upgrades.

Mike Weis, Interstate Communications' general manager, likened his company's fiber optic upgrade to "trying to find a way to keep young people here."

In other words, Interstate Communications needs to grow Truro to grow its own subscriber base. Its offices are situated at the west end of a sleepy downtown strip anchored by a tavern, Spike's barbershop and the public library.

I caught Tina Gretillat, 34, checking her e-mail and Facebook account at the library, staying in touch with family and friends around the state and in Texas. She and her three kids moved in with her father in October and haven't yet arranged online access at home.

Gretillat tends to have company. Librarian Betty Green logs as many as seven Web browsers daily on the five available computers.

Terra Wetcel, 53, is unemployed and visits the library to e-mail her children in Idaho and Georgia and fill out job applications.

"If I feed my cat today, I won't have to do that for two days," she added. That would be Wetcel's virtual cat in the Facebook game PetVille - what she characterized as a relaxing online distraction that draws her back to the library.

Rural Iowa also home to high-end computing

If the library serves as a backup plan for local residents on the fringes of online access, the opposite end of the spectrum is just several miles away at Appcore Technology.

Appcore is a cloud computing company that since 2008 has been headquartered east of Truro and relies on the Interstate Communications network to conduct business across continents. Led by venture capitalist Brian Patrick Donaghy, Appcore coordinates with its other offices in New York, London and Zimbabwe from amid the Warren County cornfields. Last week I chatted with four employees who typed away on their keyboards next to a crackling wood-burning stove.

Appcore seemed worlds away from Jerry Clarke in technological terms, even though it's little more than 4 miles down the road.

But that's rural Iowa for you - a different angle on the digital revolution from mile to mile.

Even Jerry might be surfing the Web in 2011 on the new fiber optic line.

"I'm going to consider hooking up to it," he said. "It's getting about compulsory."

Kyle Munson can be reached at (515) 284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa), Twitter (@KyleMunson) and his blog (DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson).